Perspectives

Tonight I've been thinking a lot about an upcoming paper I have to write for my literature class. It has a very open-ended prompt, but I've decided to write it on outside perspectives in Œdipus Rex, Waiting for Godot, and Wuthering Heights, and how they influence and are affected by the plot and narration of their respective works.  It's a pretty abstract thing, at least for me, since I'm used to having very clear comparatives, and this doesn't seem to have one, although I've gotten to a bit of a start in noticing that all of the outside figures (Œdipus, who it will be recalled is from Corinth; the shepherds and other random figures from the past who bear such crucial information; Vladimir and Estragon who find themselves in some nowhere universe; and Lockwood, as well as the various outside figures in the story who inevitably die off) end up returning to some state of innocence in the end, which is a concrete start, I suppose.

In thinking about this subject, I decided to peruse JSTOR for some articles, if any should exist, and thinking myself somewhat familiar with Proust's work and curious to see how this problem should apply to the modern epic he wrote, I searched for "narrative Proust", expecting perhaps something about the discrepancies between Marcel and the narrator, or the participation of the narrator in the plot.

What caught my eye instead, however, was an article by Albert Sonnenfeld entitled Marcel Proust: Antisemite? ( http://www.jstor.org/stable/394885 ).  Of course, I do not think him to have been an anti-Semite.  His portrayals of Bloch and Swann, even when critical, were entirely separate from their religion, and, though I haven't read the whole article yet (the title certainly raises enough of a question for me to discuss it), raising the point of Charlus' anti-Semitism is hardly an indictment of Proust himself.  The observation that the narrator "(unlike Marcel Proust), is untainted by semitic blood" seemed initially to me to be inaccurate, but may be correct after some further thought.  Of course, Proust's narrator was also heterosexual, and Proust's real and fictional Dreyfusism cannot be denied (though I suppose one could believe correctly in Dreyfus' innocence without thinking poorly of his Jewish roots.

In sum, I find any idea of Proust's anti-Semitism to be so easily refuted to not be worth discussing, personally.  However, I cannot help but recall a set of e-mails I exchanged with a wealthy university donor at the start of the year who wished to organize some event about Proust and Judaism who had been redirected to myself by a friend who knew of my obsession - or more accurately, worship - of the French author.  Long story short, nothing ever materialized because I didn't have the proper connections at the university, and also felt a bit disingenuous to the dead man that I respect so much in having limited his work to the scope of "Jewish author", just as I should have felt to classify Kafka as a "Czech author" or Joyce as a "Catholic author".  They transcend such superficial boundaries. ...but I have digressed. I would just like to note the irony here.  One gentry-scholar sees Proust as the ultimate Jewish author - a supporter of Dreyfus who made Swann his hero; one academician sees him as an anti-Semite, ashamed of his own heritage, so prone to forming "Little Nuclei", as one could put it (or so I imagine Sonnenfeld would put it, as this is the only real way in which Bloch's Judaism becomes anything resembling a negative).

As for me, being a young man whose ancestors emerged from "Hebron vales" myself but who doesn't quite buy into the concept of a Jewish identity superceding any nationalistic identity (I identify first as a Mainer, something I may touch on at some point), I like think that Proust falls within some middle ground.